An eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.

After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.

This book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.

The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.

This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.